2. If plausible, release something shit / half done. You will feel embarrassed and want to fix it up.
3. Just get started. Do a minute. Soon you will be in work mode, and forcing yourself to no to do it, so you can sleep at an appropriate time!
4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.
5. Habits are very powerful. Your brush your teeth, right?
> 4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.
I'm not entirely with you about gyms in particular. Weights might just not be your thing as an individual, but "going to the gym is not fun" is often about the logistical problems of timing around gyms (peak hours, January rushes especially) and not necessarily that it's an inherently bad experience. If you're going when it's dead, it can actually be pretty great.
If you're doing it now, then yeah, it's a bad idea (and there's a separate ramble on that), but it doesn't have to be.
Broadly though, I agree with you. You'll never find me on a treadmill, but will find me on a DDR cab.
It depends. Sometimes it feels like a pain (which coincides with fewer reps to fatigue etc.). Sometimes I get a buzz. Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.
I've been lifting weights for 20 years and this is what I have discovered too. You can keep your sleep/nutrition/work schedule very consistent and some days things will just be harder in the gym. On those days, I will do a little less extra exercises and just stick with the basic compound movements that I was going to do.
On the flip side, there are great days too. Take advantage of those and get a little more done in the gym. Overall it's about consistency of the practice, not about an individual session being great.
> It depends… Body isn’t in the same “mood” every time. And I space out sessions.
I have to say that physiological randomness of this kind is one of the main "use cases" for structured routines.
Before I lived such a structured life, I also felt like I would enter various activities with a roulette wheel of emotions. Which I found to be a big problem! But these days, and due to my structure, a) my mood is highly stable and predictable and b) on the rare occasions when my mood deviates, I usually have a very good idea of why, e.g. deviations in sleep.
Yes. Cab being Cabinet, slang for an arcade setup of Dance Dance Revolution as opposed to the home version. I'm with you GP, DDR/ITG dedicabs have always been a way to get me out of a rut.
Stepmania is great. I actually built a skeleton of a workout tracker for DDR a while back using the simfiles I was already playing this on. I haven't had a space to play in that consistently in years, though, so I never bothered to bring the hosted demo back up when Heroku killed their free tier and kinda stalled the development before it got more than just fleshed out enough to be kind of useful.
That said, there's a mostly working .sm to .ssc converter (it's still got a couple edge cases around punctuation in titles), as I had to migrate the simfiles to something with named properties anyway to get reliable data out of them.
This, and the seeder script (which I wrote using a bunch of fetch requests in order to also test a bunch of my frontend logic, before Node started shipping with that) that I used to seed all the DDR arcade tracks into a db, were actually my first experience with Deno. It's been my go-to experiment tool pretty much ever since.
If anyone's curious, it's under my github (same username) at step-step-recollection. (And ...recollection-scripts, and ...recollection-ui. Annoyingly I never got to experimenting with server-side rendering on it, so that's also a separate repo.)
I wasn't being hyperbolic in my use of the term "80/20." The aim, fire, scan article truly only represents about 20% of the tools/techniques I swear by.
I still don't find habit useful, at least as I interpret it as something magical that reduces pain of something you do often. If anything, pain of something I do get worse and worse the more I do it. Anything I do regularly is always because of external pressure, without that my "habit" just vanishes.
I predicted your #1 was Jordan Peterson. Tony Robbins just made an appearance on Theo Von's podcast, This Past Weekend. I haven't watched it yet, but Theo is fantastic at getting his guests to open up. I am deeply skeptical of Tony Robbins overall, but I'll probably queue up the podcast soon.
Since Channing mentions interstitial journaling, I want to share my interstitial journaling app called Interstitch at https://Interstitch.app
I shared it here on HN and PH and got 2 upvotes and zero people checking it out. But I realized half the problem is most people don’t know what interstitial journaling is. Many people understandly confuse it for a journaling app. But it’s closer to a time tracking app but more for individual performance than invoicing. But I assumed I was the only person who finds this useful, which was ok since I’ve been using it to set “deep work” daily goals and summarize how I spent my week so at least I use it.
Then the CEO of Medium somehow sees the HN post and emails me that he coined the term, but I probably heard it from Ness Labs founder that Channing links to. So then I email her and she adds me to her newsletter which has like 100k subscribers and about 100 people are now using it which is cool. Good lesson in reaching the right audience.
Wow, this is… this is amazing. I thought my system was genius only I could derive, but here you’ve got a ton of it written down, plus a whole bunch of other ideas that sound great - I love “ABZs” in particular, and the “three Me’s” is great. On that note, read some Extended Mind philosophy if you haven’t, originally from Chalmers I believe
Out of curiosity, do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?
> On that note, read some Extended Mind philosophy if you haven’t, originally from Chalmers I believe
Literally considering writing a book on extended mind theoretic ideas. Highly recommend Andy Clark's "Supersizing the Mind" (2010).
> do you think this is self-treatment for attention deficiencies, or just an effective set of strategies? In other words, is this a life strategy or a work strategy?
Both. At first (~10 years ago) it was about managing deficiencies, but before long I was performing far above the average neurotypical knowledge worker.
> I thought my system was genius only I could derive.
Spoilers: Nobody is that special. Even the greats in history stand out only due to a complex combination of talent, dedication, position, and opportunity.
Couldn't agree more. I always return to the following quote [1] from Marvin Minsky, who's an intellectual hero of mine:
> Most people think that accomplishments like [those of geniuses] require "talents" or "gifts" that cannot be explained… [but] I suspect that genius needs… unusually effective ways to learn. It’s not enough to learn a lot; one also has to manage what one learns. Those masters have, beneath the surface of their mastery, some special knacks of “higher-order” expertise, which help them organize and apply the things they learn. It is those hidden tricks of mental management that produce the systems that create those works of genius.
This mindset is more useful in a competitive environment where you want to cycle new information in a faster loop than your opponent. Thinking about it, I’m not sure it would be that valuable in my typical corporate experience - no outer loops to get inside of. Maybe my managers so I can stay a step ahead?
Observe situation as it is, Orient yourself and resources in this new situation, Decide on next action, Act.
The application is identical. TFA just renames it to Aim Fire Scan with an even more conflict-oriented sequence name.
The main "get inside the loop" takeaway from OODA is just "Be agile and respond quickly to outcomes" rather than "March forward on your original plan", when applied in a non-competitive environment.
See sibling comment for a good definition. OODA is the repetitive loop of observing, understanding, planning and executing. The military talk about getting inside the enemy's OODA loop, by which they mean having a faster decision-making cycle.
But back in the network-enabled-capability day, they also used to talk about self-synchronising units operating on the cusp of tactical anarchy, but then Afghanistan happened and they had a collective sense-of-humour failure regarding these future operational concepts.
I like this post and find some of it quite helpful as a framework, but certain pieces are sufficiently vague that I actually have no idea what's being said:
"As a rule with few exceptions, you want to move forward through iteration loops, not backward. (Too often, moving backward is a sign of problems with doing, not problems with planning.)"
What does that mean? a short example here would help. How do I know if reprioritizing is going backwards or a problem of doing vs. what was advised up above?
I agree that some of this was kinda weird or just meant for those "in the know," but it was mostly a good piece. I especially appreciate the ABZ idea, because it comports with one of the best pieces of advice I got in college, "Work from the end, to the beginning." What does the finish product look like and how did it get there? It frames your (my) thinking better when I don't have an answer. If I take the learned experience of what I've done (A) what I'm working on already (B), and I know I want to make (Z), that's end-to-beginning thinking.
I guess it means for some "plan do check act" loop, you want to avoid doing a plan, a do, then to plan again (because you have something important to note), then do a bit etc... This kind of back and forth were you subvert the principle by turning the loop into a 2 step pseudo-iteration.
Am in between house rentals at the moment and the general concept of “commitment agreements” is one that’s been on my mind. Particularly the desire to pay 6 or X months up front for a place - maybe it exists in the commercial space but haven’t seen it for general residential agreements.
Some cool points made in this article thanks for sharing. It’s a bit broad and formulaic to be directly actionable in my opinion but that can be seen as good/bad depending on the reader
Strongly agree. I think a point not explicit in OP's article is having low quality initial Plans in order to move forward.
Logically, we want a Plan to move towards our Goal. As Engineers we often suffer from Analysis Paralysis: lots of paths to the goal with no clear winner. We also slow down from Impostor Syndrome: surely a smarter/more talented person knows the one true Plan forward to the goal.
> I make a plan, then do the plan, then learn from my efforts by reviewing my progress. I do this every day of the year, going on half a decade now. [At many time scales: three hour cycles going up to three-month cycles.]
I believe OP would agree that the Plan should be low quality, at least at the beginning. This encourages forward movement, and learning, vs just planning in circles and without using real-world data.
The links for the bus method, interstitial journaling, and rubber ducking all point to the same link for interstitial journaling. Also, the later "e.g. the BUS method" link points to interstitial journaling as well.
Why complicate things? Make a plan, start executing it, review and adjust. There's all there is to it.
If you put down hours in a mindful way towards your objective, you will progress, regardless if you want to learn to play piano, discover a revolutionary drug or get rich.
Keeping it simple is probably a good policy for most people most of the time. But for those who want to break through the plateaus that simple solutions will inevitably lead to, they can look to posts like this one.
Part of the depth of the article is what to do if you’re stuck. How do you get out of writers block? Then they offer some concrete techniques that are effective.
1. Set your standards (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUck-umj2WI, yes it is him, but it is good.)
2. If plausible, release something shit / half done. You will feel embarrassed and want to fix it up.
3. Just get started. Do a minute. Soon you will be in work mode, and forcing yourself to no to do it, so you can sleep at an appropriate time!
4. Try to do fun stuff if possible. Going to the gym is not fun, but it feels good after. But if you have a side project, make it a fun one, something you really are in to.
5. Habits are very powerful. Your brush your teeth, right?